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LeannaRoss's avatar
LeannaRoss
Community Member
2 months ago

Articulate Storyline: Sluggish Courses?

Hi everyone,

I've uploaded many different Storyline courses to our LMS365 platform in the past few months, and some of the feedback from trainees is that they encounter issues with some of the courses (I'll expand on this below). The problem is that I'm trying to ascertain if the problem is with Storyline, with LMS365, or some other issue (Internet connections, etc).

The problems they are reporting are issues such as the browser crashed when going through a course (which didn't occur outside of LMS), the page not responding, documents connected to the course won't open, buttons in LMS do not load in. The problems do not seem to be the same for every trainee (occurs for some and not for others, across different courses, etc).

I'm worried my courses are too large and I just want to rule out if it's a Storyline issue so I can move on to the next likely culprit. Thanks in advance!

storyline 360
  • AndrewHanley's avatar
    AndrewHanley
    Community Member
    2 months ago

    Hi Leanna - you know my first question, right? ;)
    What size are the courses in question (both Mb/Gb, but also number of slides)?
    and what SCORM version are you packaging them too?

    Ive had problems similar to this (well, different problems for different users on the same course) but the reason was because of headphones - I know, right?!?! Bluetooth headphones used by some members were causing a delay and de-synch of audio, and this in turn knocked out some triggers and layers which were triggered by audio timelines!

     

    • LeannaRoss's avatar
      LeannaRoss
      Community Member
      2 months ago

      Hi Andrew,

      The courses in their Storyline format type (not the zipped versions for upload) range in size from 3000 KB to 9000 KB (though a few I'm seeing are massive, upwards of 497,000 KB due to videos embedded!). Slide lengths are 15-25 (and I do enjoy using layers!). Maybe my courses are too big? The content itself seems appropriate for a 30-45 training, but maybe I need to scale down how intricate they can be?

  • AndrewHanley's avatar
    AndrewHanley
    Community Member
    2 months ago

    3-9Mb is nothing, so no worries there.

    497Mb is pretty big, but not so much as I would immediately think the size was the cause of all the issues.

    Big high res video would definitely put a strain on your Learners devices, and if they are on slower internet speeds and/or older devices then the negative effect will be even larger.

    So maybe you could reencode some of that video down to a lower bitrate. (or if your LMS allows, use the Streaming "adaptive" option in Storyline publish settings?)

    So apart from the video, Im not entirely convined that the problem lies within your Storyline files themselves. Infact one thing you said at the start would make me think its the LMS - you said " the page not responding, documents connected to the course won't open, buttons in LMS do not load in."

    This all sounds like LMS/server issues.

    In that case, I would recommend trying out your course on ScormCloud. Its the industry standard LMS for testing purposes, and is very good at rooting out issues. (its also free for courses up to 100Mb!... so you'll need to resize down that 497Mb course in order to try it on the free version)
    https://app.cloud.scorm.com/sc/guest/SignInForm

    If possible, try to set up your test environment so it as absolute close as possible to the environment those Learners were using when tyhey reported problems. eg. if they are using slow internet, old machines, iPhone 6s etc - then you do the same.

    Even better, maybe some of the Learners themselves can try the ScormCloud versions and see if they work better?

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